August 02, 2016
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My latest keyboard experiment is by the same group that made the Infinity ErgoDox keyboard I talked about a while back. It is called the Infinity 60% Keyboard. There are three commonly-accepted sizes of keyboards for mechanical keyboard enthusiasts:

Full-size - the typical 104-key layout with the main keyboard, F-keys, full-sized arrow and navigation keys and a numeric keypad

Tenkeyless - This is the same as the full size keyboard but the section containing the numeric keypad chopped off

60% - a layout with just the main keyboard and nothing else, not even F-keys

There are plenty of other less common layouts and there are even variations in categories, but these are the main ones. Here’s a picture of my 60% keyboard:

What keyboard enthusiasts like about the smaller keyboards vary from person to person, but common reasons I’ve heard are:

Smaller keyboards take up less desk space

Getting rid of the extra keys is more efficient because it forces you to use more key combinations so your hands move less

I wasn’t interested in the Infinity 60% for the challenge or even necessarily the small size. I liked the idea of it because it, like the ErgoDox, is fully programmable. I can completely rework the way the keyboard operates and even create special functions or macros. For example, when I hold down the Caps Lock key, the blue, green, orange, and red buttons in the upper right become media keys: Mute, Play/Pause, Volume Down, and Volume Up respectively. This way, I can make the keyboard work best for me … not conform myself to the keyboard.

And yeah, I may try out the keyboard on the road the next time I go traveling …